CPRA Chairman Garret Graves discusses state lawsuits against Army Corps of EngineersCoastal Protection and Restoration Authority Chairman Garret Graves explains that the state will ask a federal judge to determine whether the Army Corps of Engineers can force the state to pay 35 percent of the $3 billion Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet restoration program and 100 percent of the cost of operating and maintaining hurricane levees along the Algiers Canal. The state contends that Congress ordered both the MR-GO project and the Algiers Canal levee maintenance costs to be conducted by the corps at 100 percent federal expense.

The decision to file suit followed repeated attempts by the state to get the corps to shoulder the full cost of both projects. In the case of the MR-GO project, state officials began lobbying on behalf of the federal government picking up the full tab beginning in 2008, including meetings with corps executives in New Orleans, Vicksburg and at the Pentagon, according to CPRA Chairman Garret Graves. State officials also presented their arguments to White House officials, he said.

The lawsuits come as the state is attempting to pressure the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East to drop a damage suit filed in July against 97 oil, gas and pipeline companies. But on Tuesday Graves said the levee authority's suit conflicted with the state's larger coastal restoration strategy, including the new MR-GO suit.

The levee authority lawsuit covers damages caused by energy companies the same area that is included in the Corps restoration plan.

Graves said the two new suits approved on Tuesday represented only a small part of the damage he contends the corps has caused to the state's coastline, and that the state had hoped to avoid a court battle.

"I want to be clear that some allege this is a big watershed lawsuit against the corps," said Graves. "But that's not what this is. We tried for four years to prevent getting to this point.

"We have a project that otherwise could be under construction right now, but it's not," he said. "We want the project built, the corps wants the project built. We're now at an impasse."

The state contends that language included in federal legislation deauthorizing the 72-mile shipping shortcut between the Gulf of Mexico and the Industrial Canal in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina required that the corps complete a study of how to restore the area and complete any projects at full federal expense.

The corps has insisted that a 1986 water resources bill requires all restoration project costs be shared, with 65 percent paid by the federal government and 35 percent by the state.

While the state had agreed to forward its share of costs for the project until the issue was resolved, the corps refused to move forward with the project, citing the state's insistence that the full cost eventually be paid by the corps. The result was that no money was requested for the project as part of corps annual budgets during the past two years.

Meanwhile, the state has used part of the money it set aside to begin construction of several projects called for in the corps plan, hoping that it will eventually be repaid.

The issue involving operation and maintenance costs for the levees along the Algiers Canal also arose in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, said Assistant Attorney General David Peterson. The Attorney General's Office will file the suits in both cases.

Until post-Katrina improvements to West Bank levees were completed, the corps continued to pay the full cost of operation and maintenance of that levee segment, as required under 1999 and 2007 water resources bills, Peterson said.

But the corps contends that approval of several post-Katrina supplemental appropriations for West Bank levee improvements, including one in 2008, required the local sponsor to pay 100 percent of the operation, maintenance, repair, replacement and rehabilitation costs of the West Bank levees, including the Algiers Canal levees.

When the corps recently announced that they're ready to turn over the Algiers Canal and other West Bank levees to the state and the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-West, it sent the state a letter "guidance" saying the corps was no longer responsible for operation and maintenance costs.

As with the MR-GO dispute, the state will ask a federal judge to determine who is correct.

Meanwhile, several of the coastal authority's board members made clear that they remain opposed to the East Bank levee authority lawsuit against energy companies. They said evidence is mounting that the levee authority's suit is causing oil and gas companies to stop cooperating with state and local officials on levee and restoration projects.

Steve Wilson, a member of the authority and president of the board of commissioners of the Pontchartrain Levee District, said Motiva Enterprises, his own employer, had informed him that it would no longer participate in a project to build a pumping station to drain rainfall into wetlands on the north side of the St. Charles levee. The levee district Wilson represents includes St. Charles and St. John the Baptist parishes.

Motiva, which is part-owned by Shell Oil Co., a defendant in the East Bank levee authority suit, had helped build two earlier pump stations that have been instrumental in reducing salinity in the Labrance Wetlands.

"From a personal perspective, this has screwed us to death," Wilson said. "I've been told, 'Don't dare come ask for money.' And from the same people who, a year ago, were asking when the plans would be ready for that pump station.

"'Don't ask,'" they said. 'We're in that lawsuit now,'" he said.

Graves said Sundown Energy also cited the levee authority suit in telling state officials it would abandon its Plaquemines Parish oil storage facility and move out of state. The company has been negotiating with the state and the corps to get a bridge rebuilt to its facility, in the east bank of Plaquemines, after it was washed out by the newly-formed Mardi Gras Pass that cuts through the Bohemia Spillway.

Graves said the state had been close to negotiating a plan to allow the new crevasse, seen by environmental groups as a natural sediment diversion that will rebuild wetlands, to continue to operate by routing the water through large concrete culverts on which a bridge would be built.

Graves said the state also has run into problems negotiating use of private property for other restoration projects, where the owner was an oil company named in the suit. He did not identify that company.

John Barry, the former East Bank levee authority vice president who was not reappointed by Gov. Bobby Jindal because of his support for the suit, defended the suit against the oil companies. Speaking at Tuesday's meeting as a member of the public, Barry said the suit was designed to protect the lives of residents behind the New Orleans area's levees by forcing the energy companies to comply with state law and lease clauses that should have required them to restore wetlands their operations destroyed.

If the wetlands can't be restored, the suit requests the companies to pay damages to the levee authority, with the money to be used to strengthen levees to take into account the lost wetland protection.

"We're not suing the oil industry because they have money," said Barry. "The authority decided to sue the oil industry because the authority was convinced they broke the law."

Barry last month started Restore Louisiana Now, a non-profit group created to support the levee authority's lawsuit and other restoration efforts. He said he found it offensive that members of the state Legislature have threatened to nullify the suit during the next legislative session. "It's saying that the industry is above the law," he said.

Graves said legislative action was inevitable.

"Anybody who believes the Legislature is not going to shut this down is living in a dream world," he said.